Upon Finding

Monday, July 17, 2017

Tar'van shook the stiffness out of his joints and
looked around. He wasn't certain what
had just happened. Clearly he had
downloaded but the exact order of events leading up to it was...muddled.

There had been a human. They had been on the planet. There had been a human domicile. Beyond that, the details became difficult to
recall.

The human was waiting at the bottom of the
ramp. "Are you all right?"

"I am...okay.
This body is new."

"I apologize, I didn't know there was someone
in the house."

Tar'van took it in warily. "Are there other humans still
inside?"

"No."

Tar'van started toward the house, but checked
himself. "Have you already
searched?"

"Yes, I did.
I looked around upstairs and down, and the place is empty. There's fresh bread on the counter but the
people are gone."

Bread. "This body is hungry. Bread is good."

"Yes, it is.
Do you want some?"

"Yes."

She led him into the house. Feeling an unfamiliar trepidation, he was especially
cautious as he approached the large seating structure in the main room, ready
to leap back. He didn't know where that
unease came from, but he was nevertheless wary.

In the kitchen the human picked up a large knife and
he nearly jumped back through the doorway.
"Drop the weapon."

"What, this?
It's for cutting food."

"A knife is a knife, whatever its stated
purpose."

"Fine."
She slapped the knife down onto the work surface and stepped away from
it. "Happy?"

"No.
I..." Tar'van struggled for a precise description. Being what he was, emotional responses
weren't something he usually had to contend with but he was having one all the
same. To cut through the Ordan
conditioning, it had to be a strong one.
"...hate this
planet." He took in all the
furnishings of the kitchen, sparse as they were. A peculiar sitting structure, completely
different from the ones in the main room, offered itself. He dropped his weight onto it and tried not
to sag with relief. It was the first
piece of human furniture he had encountered that worked for him. "This planet makes me heavy. It is soaking in water. It is fatally cold over a significant part of
its surface. It crawls with tiny
creatures that are fatal to my kind. It
is teeming with humans who die at the lowest disruptor setting but are somehow
difficult to eradicate anyway. I hate this planet. I do not like it here."

"Well, if we're being candid we don't want you
here either."

Tar'van waved a manipulator dismissively. "That is logical."

"You should have left us alone."

"Our orders cannot be countermanded. This planet was examined at length and found
to be a suitable target for a new Ordan colony.
It will be ours. It requires very
little modification to its climate to sustain a large number of Ordans. We need only eliminate the humans and many of
the animals and we can begin populating the planet. The first wave of colonial freighters will
arrive in three hundred twenty-eight years, there is no time to waste. We have insufficient resources to relocate
humans to a planet that is unsuitable for Ordans, so it was obvious that your
population would have to be extinguished to make room for ours."

"Examined at length? You were able to determine this planet suited
you from...how far away?"

"I do not have human distance equivalents. Very far.
Our cruisers were in transition for slightly more than four hundred of
your years. But the investigation
determined surface temperatures, gravity and atmospheric constituents,
yes. Upon arrival we found the surface
temperature significantly warmer than we expected, but the temperature change
suits us."

"Could've used you a few years ago during
elections, but never mind that now."

Tar'van disregarded that. It didn't appear to be a statement needing a response from him. Humans did that from time to time and
sometimes he understood it.

"Why do humans persist? Large populations of humans do not cooperate
well. Your technology is extraordinarily
advanced in some fields and ancient history by Ordan standards in others. You
are not strong. There are proto-hominids
on one of the other continents that are much stronger than humans but they are
not dominant. You are one of the slower
varieties of life form on this planet, especially considered in terms of body
lengths per interval of time. You have
poor defenses. You have poor
weapons..."

"You got your head blown off not too long ago,
Tar'van." The human very carefully
tore a piece from the bread on the work surface, keeping her hands away from
the knife.

He waved a manipulator again, clicking the claws
agitatedly. "You take my
meaning. Your hands are no match for my claws.
My digits are stronger than yours.
How is it humans have achieved dominance of this planet when humans are
so inferior in so many ways?"

"We're smart, creative and stubborn."

"I know 'stubborn.' It means an unwillingness to yield one's
perspective to circumstances or evidence."

"Yes.
Looked at another way, we don't give up easily, and we're smart enough
to think our way out of problems that our weak fingers and slow legs couldn't
make up otherwise."

"When an animal runs away faster than you can
chase it, there is no thinking past that.
It is faster. It escapes."

"It escapes for
the moment. Humans are completely
unlike the vast majority of other animals, Tar'van. If we decided we want to hunt an animal, a
specific animal, well, we run after it."

"It runs away."

"We keep running. We catch up.
It runs away again."

"It escapes."

"We keep running. We catch up again. We can do that over and over. Humans are relentless. Nothing survives humans. You could have flown your cruisers on past us
but no, you had to land. You could fly
away but we don't have that capability and now you're here and you have no idea what kind of a hornet's nest you kicked over
when you landed on Earth."

"Hornet's nest?"

"Like yellow jackets."

"Yes.
Yellow jackets! They are
dangerous and the other human said they are not food. Why tolerate them? But you tolerate them and your species
thrives in spite of the obvious hazard.
How does that relate to humans chasing animals?"

"We are very good at figuring out ways to kill
things that are stronger, faster, more dangerous than ourselves. Very, very good. Wear them out. Run them down. Pick them off at a distance. Hack them to death, a piece at a time. And the things that could be dangerous but
aren't, we just leave them alone. If we
don't have to bother them, we don't.
Simple."

Tar'van noted the distance from the human to the
knife. "You have become volatile
and dangerous. I shall disrupt you and
choose another guide." He reached
for his weapon but the human leaned forward and leapt in a way he had never seen before, and there was a sudden tug
on his weapon arm.

"Ha! I
guessed right." She whirled into
the air, an improbable spring he had never witnessed before and certainly
couldn't have done himself, and she kicked off his other arm. "You're a lot like crabs!"

Curse. She
had inferred the presence of the fracture planes in his joints.

"Were you ever young, Tar'van? I only ever see you as an adult staggering
out of your cooler, how long has it been since you went through a molt? That carapace doesn't grow, does it?" Kick. Her arms outflung, the human twirled across
the room. "You shed it as you grow, don't you?" She twirled back, gaining speed. Kick. "It's a survival adaptation, isn't
it? Being able to drop a limb. It gives your body a way to escape if it
becomes trapped in the shed shell, or something."

Flat on his back, staring up at the human who had interposed
herself between him and the top of the room, he marveled, abstractedly, at her
focus. Was this not fighting? She had taken him apart in a few seconds, and
never even looked at the knife. "I
recognize this. Martial arts, forms of human fighting."

"Nope!"
She breathed heavily. "I'm
out of shape. I don't know any martial
arts at all, Tar'van. That was
ballet. I danced for years and
years."

"If it is not for fighting, then why did you use
it against me?"

"Because I'm smart, creative and stubborn. And you..." she straddled his thorax and
grabbed either side of his head, "...could have just left us
alone." She pulled hard, then
twisted violently.

Tar'van shook the stiffness out of his joints and
looked around. He wasn't certain what
had just happened. Clearly he had
downloaded but the exact order of events leading up to it wasn't completely
clear.

There had been a human. They had been on the planet. There had been a human domicile. Beyond that, the details became difficult to
recall. He made his way through the
striker to the exit ramp, taking in the surroundings carefully.

The human guide was outside the human domicile a
short distance away. Faintly he detected
her voice. "Damn it."

Tar'van looked at the house, feeling uneasy. Bread. Human food sometimes ingested with fruit
sugars partially digested by insects.
Revolting. He had a nagging
suspicion that humans could - perhaps even would
- eat literally anything. Kitchen. Food preparation area. "We
will not spend any more time inside it, then."

"Are you all right?"

"I am all right. This body is new."

"I didn't know there was anyone hiding in the
house."

Tar'van looked at the human domicile. He felt vaguely uneasy. "I will not examine this
structure."

"Suit yourself.
I have checked it out. It looks
like someone was here before but they aren't here now. There's fresh bread on the counter in the
kitchen."

"Are you familiar with this part of this
planet?"

"It looked to me like we were coming down in
Florida. I'm not from Florida but I've
been here a few times. Familiar, not
really. But I can probably show you
around."

"We will not enter another structure."

"Okay."

Tar'van pointed across the expansive yard from the
house, where a road crossed the field and beyond it, sluggish water and reeds
waved in the breeze. "What do you
call this sort of terrain?"

"Where we are right now is a field. Over there it's a marsh. A marsh is where the ground has a lot more
water in it, and there are likely to be places where the ground is very soft,
possibly saturated with water. Places
with open water may be common. When
you're in a marshy area and you start to encounter more water than dry land,
that's when you call it a swamp."

"I do not know the word 'swamp.'"

"I don't know where it comes from, but when you
have a boat and it's full of water, you might call the boat swamped, and I
think it's like that. The ground is
swamped. It's just completely full of
water."

"That is a suitable explanation. Whether it is correct is not important. Your species will be eliminated, your language
will cease to be, and the endless semantic difficulties it presents will be
moot. Ordans will drain the swamp to
provide more land."

"Good luck with that."

"My race subdued our planet. We will do the same with this one."

"How long did that take you?"

"Approximately eighteen thousand of your
years."

"And why are you here?"

"The environment of our world is collapsing to
the point it will no longer support complex life. Clearly it is an imperfect world. We will make this world more perfect and it
will support us."

"Don't you think there's a chance Ordan
meddling with the environmental balance may have upset things and caused the
collapse?"

"That possibility has been raised in
discussion. What of it?"

"Knowing that possibility exists, don't you
think it's a little reckless to just give it a whirl on another planet?"

"It is not reckless. A human phrase is applicable in this
instance: practice makes perfect."

"Yes, but usually when we practice we don't
destroy our neighbors' homes when we get things wrong."

"You are not our neighbors. We are on a clear path of progress, you are
an obstacle."

"Sometimes when you run into obstacles, you die
from injuries sustained in the crash."

"Your vehicles are insufficiently sturdy."

"Sometimes the obstacles are just that
tough."

They stood by the water's edge. Tar'van wandered closer.

"Don't go any closer, Tar'van."

"Do not comm...why not?"

"There are large, dangerous reptiles to be
found in bodies of water all over the tropical regions of the world. Florida has a lot of them. They're called alligators."

"How dangerous?"

"Do you see me getting any closer to the
water?" She was several meters
farther away from the water than Tar'van.
He retreated back toward her.
"They're ambush predators.
They lie still in the water for hours until prey forget the alligators
are there, then they lunge and strike."

"How big do these animals get?"

"Depends on where you are. Some of them get big enough to eat..."
she looked at Tar'van appraisingly, "...you."

"Again, a human is telling me of a dangerous
species whose continued existence you tolerate in spite of the risk. Why?"

"We don't use the water that much, so we're
happy enough to let the alligators have it.
Besides, they're good to eat."

"Another alarming creature that humans eat."

"We eat everything."

"I am learning that." He scanned the water. "I see no sign of animal life in this
body of water."

"Any open water you see in the southeastern
United States, you assume there's either alligators or snapping turtles in
it. You just do. It's safer that way."

"How do you eradicate these creatures? They will not be useful to Ordans."

"I don't know, really. Alligators were wandering around on this
planet about the same time dinosaurs evolved.
They've been here for millions and millions of years. They're hard to kill if you're thinking about
killing them all."

In the water, a long snout slowly surfaced into
view.

"That's convenient, there's one now. Huh, that's not an alligator."

"You mentioned another creature called a
snapping turtle."

"No, no.
I'll show you turtles later. No,
that's a crocodile. They look very
similar to alligators and occupy the same ecological niche."

"That phrase is complex."

"The crocodiles live the same way and eat the
same things as the alligators."

"That is inefficient. One species in an
ecological niche is sufficient."

"Take your complaint up with management. I just work here."

"Are the crocodiles dangerous?"

"Oh, yes.
They get even bigger than alligators and have a longer history in the
fossil record."

"And are they also good to eat?"

"I don't know.
I've never tried it.
Probably. They're not as common
as gators, though, so I don't know if it's legal to eat them in the
States."

"Society is part of humankind, so as long as
there are more than one of us, a society of humans exists. I'll continue to respect the laws as I know
them. If you command me to kill a
crocodile under threat of death I'd still be unwilling to do it."

"We will eliminate crocodiles in addition to
your own kind. If I command you to kill
a crocodile, it cannot make a difference.
The species shall be eliminated as surely as your own. Die now or die later, they will all
die."

"But it will not be me that killed them."

"What difference can that make?"

"It makes a difference to me."

"That is not relevant."

"And I don't care. It makes a difference to me. The crocodile doesn't get a say in what I do
to it, but I do. And I say, I don't need
to kill it. I don't need to eat it, I
don't need to wear its skin, I don't need its environment for myself. I can afford to leave it alone. To kill it needlessly when I could simply
leave it alone would be a weight on my conscience. If I had no conscience whatsoever then kill
it or don't, doesn't make a difference to me.
But I do have a conscience. It
would be inhumane to kill for no reason, not when I can just walk right past it
and leave it alone. It isn't threatening
me and it won't go far from its swamp. I
could just leave it alone. You ordering
me to kill it is an arbitrary command that I can choose to obey or not if I
consider the command to be unethical."

The human's conviction was worth testing. Tar'van drew his disuptor and leveled it at
the human, who backed up a couple of steps.
"Kill the crocodile."

"I can't..." She didn't get to say more before Tar'van's
manipulator exploded in a grayish-green spray of blood and chitinous
shards. The disruptor flew away and landed
in the water.

*Crack*

Tar'van took two steps backwards. "How...?" He cradled the wounded limb, looking at the
ripples where the weapon had landed. The
human advanced toward him, and he backed up some more.

"Snipers.
We're too close to the woods."

"Noted for future reference." He hissed with pain. Unlike losing a limb at a joint, losing one
in this manner was causing tremendous blood loss. But the wretched human was still talking.

"Now or tomorrow doesn't matter, you said. Kill it anyway, you said."

"...unreliable human..." His vision was already darkening at the
edges. He was losing too much
blood. As soon as he downloaded, he
would rearm and eliminate her quickly.
Humans were entirely too sneaky and dangerous, they killed from
tremendous distances and seemingly came out of nowhere to do it. The earlier human had mentioned snipers but
Tar'van had not appreciated just how great a human's killing range could
be. The woods were at least three
hundred meters away.

"No. I
am completely reliable. You can
absolutely count on me. I will kill as
many of you as I can. That's a
promise."

"...conscience...?"

"I don't get a say. You're a threat that won't leave us
alone. I have to fight." She waved a hand over her head and turned
away.

Tar'van's shoulder exploded. His wounded arm was blown off, and the shock
of the distant sniper's shot made him reel.
He staggered. Again there came
the distant, delayed crack of a human
weapon. The human female whirled,
charged at him and kicked. He stumbled
some more, falling into the dark, tepid water of the swamp.

A low, dark green shape with eyes advanced
rapidly. Tar'van had a moment to see a
huge mouth full of teeth suddenly explode open in front of his eyes, and then a
wet thrashing.

Tar'van
awoke in a chamber aboard the cruiser Tar,
and looked around.

Something strange had
just happened. He had been investigating
a human domicile with a human female guide, had seen a hidden human pop up from
behind a human sitting structure, and boom.
The striker had been fully stocked with bodies, he should have
downloaded into a new one immediately.
Instead, the download had defaulted back here. Very odd.
Everything about humanity was odd.

"Are
any messages waiting for my attention?"
Always check messages first. Even
the humans held communications as a priority.

The
attendant checked. "One, from
Tar'noth."

"Scan
the planet for my striker." He
provided the craft's registration number and transponder code.

"Your
striker is not on the surface."

"What?"

The
attendant looked startled. "No
returns from any striker on the planet surface with that number or
code." An Ordan didn't look
startled easily. "It is also not in
the ship's complement. Are you certain
of the code?"

"Yes!"

"Scan
the surface for all strikers and
cross-check against all units signed out."

The
attendant was not familiar with that task but it wasn't too different from
cataloging the ranks of waiting Ordan bodies, so he got it done. "All accounted for. Two wrecks, signed out five days ago and lost
to enemy action over water.
Unrecoverable."

"I
signed out a striker less than four hours ago, and it is not on the
surface?"

"No
record here of that vessel being signed out.
There is some kind of error. No
ships are missing, and you are here. You
have not signed out a striker with that code."

"I
signed out another striker over twelve hours ago and it was lost
to...environmental hazards. There is no
signal from it?"

"No
record here of you signing out any strikers in the last five days, Tar."

"Damn it!"

"Tar?"

"I
am using human words to express frustration, disregard." The transponder aboard a striker could
survive almost anything short of a meteoric landing or a direct hit from the
largest human weapons. This morning's
crashed striker should have still had a working transponder, vectoring in a
recovery crew. The idea that one had
suddenly stopped transmitting in a fully functional striker was almost too
foreign to even conceive.

And what
could Tar'noth want?

Six

"You know, when I was a kid
I never could solve the Rubik's Cube. I
had some friends who did it and they were really fast, and they tried to
explain it to me but I couldn't follow the explanation. My brother had one and he'd fool with it from
time to time but the only way he ever solved it was to take it apart and then
put it back together correctly."

The
human speaking had a small, multicolored cube in its hand. Each face was a different color, but each face's
color was continuous. Tar'noth had a
similar cube sitting next to his access terminal, and all its faces were
scrambled. It had distracted him many
times, and frustrated him especially when a human had told him it was a toy for
preadolescent humans.

"So how'd you figure it
out?"

"I'm not sure, really. Used to be all I'd ever do was do one face,
then try to sort each other face in turn.
That doesn't work. But I've got
nothing but time here, so I've had some time to think about it. Doing one face is too isolated and doesn't
pay attention to the parity of other squares.
So I stopped trying to do one face and started focusing on a different
aspect, and I tried solving the corners.
After that it worked."

"Huh." The
other speaker paused for a few moments.
"It sounds to me like you
could follow the explanation now."

"Ha! Maybe.
I wasn't really following the explanation, when it started taking more
than three steps I just stopped listening.
About twenty years after high school my dad told me he thought I might
be ADD, but that was twenty years too late.
There's about ten people I'd really like to tell that I've solved this
damn thing, and a couple more I'd like to shake it in their face, my brother in
particular, except I don't think that's an option now. Did you see the tavern puzzles?"

"Yeah. I love those.
Except 'Patience.' I hate that
one."

"Yeah. It's just tedious to get through. You just about need pencil and paper to keep
track of what you've done. Look at this
one, though." The human held up a shape with an
intersecting bar and a couple of rings on it.
Tar'noth had one like it on his work station as well, next to the
cube. "It helps if you think of it as a mechanical transistor. Make this little change here..." and the human made a maneuver Tar'noth
couldn't see.

"Hey, do that and then you
can..." The
other human took the device, made three swift movements and one of the rings
came off, then the other. Tar'noth
stopped the video feed, backed up and watched carefully, then held up the
puzzle on his desk. No, that wouldn't
work. The bar was still in the way. "A
mechanical transistor! Nice
analogy."

Thefirst human looked around, then seemed
to fixate directly on Tar'noth, and suddenly threw the colorful cube at the
camera. Tar'noth jerked away as it
appeared to clack loudly against the inside of his view screen. "Hey! If you're not too busy melting some of my
fellow Terrans maybe you could send some of your undercrabs down to the
surface, find an Office Depot? Get me
some pencils and quad rule or something?"

"Dude. Aren't you afraid they'll kill you?"

"Not as much as I used to
be. Now I'm just kind of resigned. They'll get around to it eventually. Until that happens, there's not much to do
around here."

"You want to play a round of
rummy?"

"You gonna smoke me like
last time?"

"Probably."

"What the hell, okay."

The
human paddock was an interesting place.
The humans, contrary to their nature as observed at the beginning of the
Ordan sterilization of the planet surface, got along well. There had been a few squabbles at the
beginning, and there had been some turnover when humans escaped or were
terminated. But now mostly the challenge
with the humans was keeping them engaged and entertained. Distracted, humans were relatively biddable
and complacent. Given time and
insufficient entertainment, however, and humans were difficult to contain,
difficult to recapture, and creatively destructive while unobserved. The paddock's entrance had been reinforced
and a constant guard placed around it.
Since that had been done, there hadn't been any escapes.

Tar'noth
would have congratulated himself on the improved security, but the notion of
congratulations never crossed his mind.
He was doing his job well, that was all that mattered. Those were his orders, and he fulfilled them.

The
portal opened and Tar'van stepped in.

"Tar'van,"
he announced himself.

"Tar'noth. Have you spent much time observing the
humans?"

"Some. They are a very complex species."

"Not
more complex than ourselves, Tar."

"No,
Tar, not biologically. But socially they
are almost incomprehensible."

"Yes. I had noticed." Tar'noth had backed up the recording. "Watch this."

Tar'van
settled himself onto a saddle to observe the human interaction. "It is fairly typical of what I have
seen of them. What of it?"

"The
human has been thinking about a solution for this device," and Tar'noth
negligently clacked a manipulator at the cube, "for years. Eights of years, by the sound of it."

"So?"

"So
it has been thinking about a
solution. It hasn't had a cube in its
paws the whole time, it has only been thinking
about a solution."

"Yes,
humans spend a lot of their time on unproductive projects, sometimes only in
the abstract. What of it?"

"It
came up with a solution!"

Tar'van
looked at the cube on the work surface.
It was hopelessly scrambled. The
image on the viewer was plainly of a cube whose faces were each a single
color. "How?"

"The
creature didn't say! It only described
how it changed how it thought about the puzzle, and that was all."

"That
is remarkable. Have you had the
cryptographers try the puzzle?"

"Yes. Their computer simulation is very time consuming. I am told it should be done sometime
tomorrow."

Tar'van
sat back on the saddle, hissing through his ventral spiracles - a very rude sound. But Tar'noth didn't comment on the
informality, only continued glaring from the solved puzzle on the screen, to
the scrambled one on his desk, and back again.
Finally, he slapped the cube off the surface. It sailed across the chamber, impacted the
far wall and settled again, one facet jarred almost completely out of the whole. "What is Office Depot?"

"I
am not sure. If it is like Home Depot then it is a human supply distribution
node of some kind. I will ask my next
guide."

"What
is pencils and quad rule?"

"Pencils I am not certain about but it sounds like it may be a variation of pen. That would be a device for manual recordkeeping. In context, quad rule, if I am right about pencils, would be related to paper, which is also for manual recordkeeping."

"What could the creatures want to keep records for?"

"The one mentioned needing to keep records to successfully complete a puzzle. Probably something trivial of that nature. They expend a great deal of energy on trivial matters."

"That
one is getting restive. They are all
getting twitchy but that one concerns me.
Take it to the surface with you.
Find Office Depot, find pencils and quad rule. If it helps keep them under control, it's
worth the extra trouble."

"Before I go, I must tell you that I
believe I may have been experiencing some kind of cognitive failures. I recall checking out two separate strikers,
losing both of them, but there is no record of them being checked out."

"You
are spending too much time with the humans.
You are beginning to dream like them too, now."

"No,
these memories are very cle-"

"Yes, yes, that's
what the humans say about dreams. They
insist dreams are realistic, believable.
If they spent a fraction as much energy focusing their minds on real
things, they would have crushed our fleet before we passed the cometary
cloud. As it is they seem to be
constantly thinking about things that are not
real."

"Tar'noth..."

"Just
go, Tar'van. And take that one."

Tar'van
left the chamber. After a few minutes of
looking at it, Tar'noth went over to the fallen puzzle, picked it up, and
carefully pulled the loosened piece out the rest of the way. He looked over it, and figured out how it
went together.

Monday, June 19, 2017

The female stood back from the portal and the second
human entered. This new one was taller
than the female, dressed in the clothing Tar'van recognized as the apparently
magical stuff that made humans so cursedly difficult to detect in wooded
environments. It held a weapon of a type
that he didn't recognize. It was a
weapon he didn't recognize, but by the way the human kept it trained on
Tar'van, there was no doubt that it was a weapon.

"No names," the new human said.

"No names," the female agreed. "Though I'm not sure what difference it
will make. That might be important if we
were dealing with corrupt human governments or foreign invaders, but space
aliens...okay, no names. You can put your
crossbow away, I've disarmed him."

"And dislegged him. Damn.
What happened?"

"He was rude to me."

"Be nice to the little lady with the big knife. Got it."

"It crossed my mind that the ambusher who left
earlier might not have gone far, seeing how this was a house with working water
and a refrigerator, so I gave it a shot.
Those are conveniences I wouldn't abandon too quickly."

"We saw your SOS."

"Good."

"I see his head is intact."

"Well, yeah.
He's still alive, you know. I
don't want to kill him."

"Neither do I."

The female stepped back. "Really?
That's not what I expected to hear."

"Really.
Well, not yet. But help me turn
him over."

The humans turned Tar'van face down, and he was like
that for several minutes. He listened
carefully but could make nothing of the sounds of whatever they were doing,
infrequent clicks and ticks, and once a strange, pronounced zzzzziiiip-pop! He couldn't see their faces clearly; turned
over as he was his field of view, while still very broad, was sharply
curtailed. He could see the humans
moving around behind and above him as he lay face down on the floor, but then
the female took a cloth from the work surface and covered his eyes. He could still hear their voices, however.

"I had thought he looks so much like a crab,
maybe we should try cooking his arms and legs and see if they're good to
eat." Tar'van tried not to be
horrified at the thought. The human had
said that her species ate everything, it hadn't occurred to him at the time
that might include himself. He had
threatened an earlier human that he might
eat him, but Tar'van had never
actually meant it. Eating a human would
be incredibly bad for his digestion.
According to the biologists, it could even be fatal. He would have to stop using that threat. It hadn't been very effective lately in any
case.

"But you didn't do that?" The new human. Its voice was very different from the
female's, lower and more resonant.

"Well, you came in pretty quickly."

"Yeah."

"And his blood smells so weird, I don't think
their proteins would be good for us. He
just doesn't smell tasty."

"Yeah.
Well, they killed off enough of the population I don't think we'll need
to worry about eating the invaders."

"Oh my God,
do you mean..."

"What?
No! I was thinking, all the
canned food in the stores and warehouses will be good and there won't be nearly
as many people alive to eat it up."

"Oh! I
was afraid you were going to suggest we eat our..."

"Good grief, no! We just met a few minutes ago and you assume
I was going to suggest that?"

"People sometimes tell me I'm too
pragmatic."

"If that's your idea of pragmatism, I'm never
coming to a potluck at your place empty-handed." There were a few more clicks. "Okay.
Let's turn him back over."

On his back again, Tar'van could see their
faces. The female looked the same as
before, but the other human - he judged it a male - wore an expression he could
not interpret. It looked happy in a way,
and sad in another way. Like all the
humans it didn't change color enough to really show proper emotional cues, so
he only had guesswork to go on and it wasn't enough. "I'm really sorry about this, sir."

Tar'van observed the human. "'Sorry.' I know this word. Expression of regret or remorse. I do not believe your sincerity."

"Why not?"

"If you were truly sorry, you would not do what
I believe you are about to do."

"I really am sorry, but you leave us no
choice. Your people's actions have
forced me to do things I don't want to do.
I don't want to, but I will."

"What word is used to describe that?"

The human pondered for a moment. "I guess you could call this pragmatism,
too." He drew a large, stout knife
from his belt.

"Wait!"
The female stepped between them.

"What?"

"Not in the house. I just mopped."

Four

In the paddock, the human stared at the camera. It was innocuous, looking much like any of
the other protrusions in the wall. He
had come to the conclusion that the cruiser, large as it was, had begun as a
life form that had since either died, been killed or somehow subverted, and its
body then converted into a spacecraft with the addition of the necessary drive
systems and life support equipment. None
of the enclosures within the craft were ideally suited to occupation by
discrete life forms like the Ordans, but he could imagine that some of these
chambers were organs, and some passages and conduits vessels for circulatory
fluids.

He was curious to know how such a creature could
have evolved. Or had it been
designed? The Ordan guards, what few
there were, were not conversant in human languages so he couldn't ask.

He wondered whether the camera was supposed to be
camouflaged. It was subtle, but not
subtle enough that he couldn't pick it out against the other bumps and humps in
the wall. Some of them looked like large
hair follicles with no hairs growing out of them, but the camera was the only
one that had a faint glimmer of a lens in it.

The lens was set a modest distance below the
surface. He had observed already that
the Ordan field of vision was very broad, like a duck or deer with the eyes set
on the sides of the head. The camera's
narrow field had to be maddening, or else there were several other cameras in
the paddock to observe the humans, and sure enough after a couple of days'
search he had found nearly twenty more.

Doubtless their views could be stitched together into an image an Ordan
would find natural.

Hmm. Eyes on
the side of the head like a duck or deer.
Prey animals had their eyes on the side of the head, but predators had
eyes in the front like tigers and bears.
If you're going to be eaten you need a broad field of view so nothing
can sneak up on you, but if you're doing the eating you need to be able to
focus.

If Ordans hadn't evolved from predators, did that
mean they were prey? It had to, didn't
it? They had evolved from somewhere
besides Earth, but wouldn't evolution tend to work in much the same way? It should.
Prey animals couldn't afford to miss much, but prey animals could.

Humans had been a bit of both. Not fast or strong, but smart and
adaptable. Lots of things ate early
humans, but humans got their own licks in, too.
Then humans got smarter and few predators were able to keep up.

In an earlier scouting trip, an Ordan had told him
that they didn't eat meat. So they
didn't hunt, unless Ordan plant life was extraordinarily violent. What would that mean about the fauna of the
Ordan homeworld? Either it was utterly
overrun with animals, in which case they would compete heavily with Ordans for
food and the Ordans would have lots
of experience with hunting and killing animals strictly for the sake of
protecting their food supply, or else there were virtually no animals to speak
of, and what few there were didn't compete for food at all.

What a weird ecosystem. That couldn't be right.

"You know what, Bob?"

"What?"

"I don't think Ordans evolved into
sentience."

"No?
I've been wondering about that.
Tell me why you think so."

He expanded his theories to Bob and some of the
other humans in the paddock wandered over to join the conversation. "...so what it comes down to is this: I
think the Ordans were made."

"Made?
Don't tell me you're one of those 'Intelligent Design' types."

"Not in that way but in this case, yeah,
literally. Intelligent design. Or intelligent interference at the very
least. I don't know enough about their
homeworld of course, or I could guess at a bit more."

"I'm going to need a lot more evidence before I
buy into that hypothesis."

"I won't argue against that. But consider this: do the Ordans strike you
as a curious people?"

"You mean curious strange, or curious wanting
to learn more?"

"The second one."

"No."

"Doesn't that strike you as curious?" The human waved his hand expansively around
at the paddock's walls.